Icon, Idol, I Don’t Know.

Over at Sects and Violence in the Ancient World, Steve Wiggins ponders the question of when a decades-old portrait of Jesus in an Ohio school building becomes a religious object.

Fast forward a few decades. The world has changed drastically. We are multicultural. The internet entertains us with such stories as this. If not for the internet, and a casually chosen homepage, I would never have even heard of Jackson City, Ohio. Is it possible that we could look at a picture of Jesus in our day without religious adoration? Quite possibly. But the furor raised by the religious right every time a perceived slight stirs up the dust would seem to make such an association impossible.